According to a new study, nearly six out of ten new COVID-19 infections are spread by people who show no symptoms of the virus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study found that people without symptoms make up about 24% of all transmissions. Meanwhile, the pre-symptomatic individuals, those who contracted the virus but did not yet have symptoms, accounted for 35% of the new cases.
“In the absence of effective and widespread use of therapeutic agents or vaccines that can reduce or eliminate infectivity, successful control of SARS-CoV-2 cannot rely solely on the identification and isolation of symptomatic cases; even if applied effectively, this strategy would be inadequate, ‘the CDC researchers write in their study. “These findings suggest that effective control should also reduce the risk of transmission of people with asymptomatic infection.”
Jay Butler, deputy director for infectious diseases at CDC and a lead author of the study, said the findings of the study support the guidelines for health care, which should appeal to masks and social distance.
“There was still controversy about the value of community mitigation – face masks, social distance and hand hygiene – to limit the spread,” said Dr. Butler told Business Insider. “This study shows that while symptom screening may have some value, mitigation as well as strategic planned testing of individuals in a given environment will be a significant benefit.”
The study said: ‘The basic assumptions for the model were that peak contagion occurred at the median of onset of symptoms and that 30% of individuals with infection never develop symptoms and 75% are as contagious as those who do develop symptoms. . Taken together, these assumptions imply that individuals with infection who never develop symptoms may account for approximately 24% of all transmissions. In this basic case, 59% of all transmission came asymptomatic transmission, consisting of 35% of presymptomatic individuals and 24% of individuals who never develop symptoms. According to a wide range of values for each of these assumptions, it has been estimated that at least 50% of the new SARS-CoV-2 infections were caused by exposure to individuals with infection but without symptoms. ”
The study concluded: “In this analytical model of multiple scenarios of asymptomatic individuals’ relationships with COVID-19 and infectious periods, the transmission of asymptomatic individuals is estimated to be more than half of all broadcasts. In addition to identifying and isolating persons with symptomatic COVID-19, effective control of spread will reduce the risk of transmission of persons with asymptomatic infection. These findings suggest that measures such as wearing masks, hand hygiene, social distance and strategic testing of non-sick people will lay the groundwork to delay the spread of COVID-19 until safe and effective vaccines are available and widely used. word. ”
But the CDC said “this study has limitations.”
‘First, we used a simple model to represent a complex phenomenon, i.e., the average infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 infections over time. We deliberately used this model to test assumptions about the timing of peak infectivity and transmission among asymptomatic individuals, so that we can vary only these two critical parameters and determine their relative effects. Therefore, these results lack quantitative precision, but they show the qualitative roles of these two components and show that the finding that asymptomatic transmission is a critical part of the SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics, across the wide range of possible assumptions constant lead.
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